Western Sydney University invites you to submit papers, abstracts, demos, and posters for the 25th Annual ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST 2019).

VRST 2019 is the premier international symposium for the presentation of new research results, systems, and techniques among researchers and developers concerned with Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality software and technology.

For the 25th silver anniversary of the conference, this year VRST 2019 will be hosted by Western Sydney University in Sydney, Australia, from 12 November to 15 November 2019. VRST 2019 is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), SIGCHI, and SIGGRAPH.

The Second ACM PETRA Workshop on Social Robots: A Workshop on the Past, the Present and the Future of Digital Companions
At PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) 2019Rhodes, Greece
June 5-7, 2019http://www.petrae.org/workshops/socialrobots.html

Timeline:
March 20, 2019: Proposals Due (1,000 words)
June 15, 2019: Full Papers Due

MOTIVATION

Over the past decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has increasingly been deployed across many domains such as transportation, retail, criminal justice, finance and health. But these very domains that AI is aiming to revolutionize may also be where human implications are the most momentous. The potential negative effects of AI on society, whether amplifying human biases or the perils of automation, cannot be ignored and as a result such topics are increasingly discussed in scholarly and popular press contexts. As the New York Times notes: “[…] if we want [AI] to play a positive role in tomorrow’s world, it must be guided by human concerns.”

However, simply introducing human guidance or human sensitivity into AI is not going to be enough to realize AI’s full potential or to prevent its unintended consequences. AI is increasingly being incorporated into technology design, including technologies of deep interest to researchers and practitioners in human computer interaction (HCI). While most AI-based approaches offer promising methods for tackling real-world problems, many of the technologies they enable have been developed in isolation, without appropriate involvement of the human stakeholders who use these systems and who are the most affected by them. Human involvement in AI system design, development, and evaluation is critical to ensure that AI-based systems are practical, with their outputs being meaningful and relatable to those who use them. Moreover, human activities and behaviors are deeply contextual, complex, nuanced, and laden with subjectivity; aspects which may cause current AI-based approaches to fail as they cannot adequately be addressed by simply adding more data. As a result, to ensure the success of future AI approaches, we must incorporate new complementary human-centered insights. These include stakeholders’ demands, beliefs, values, expectations, and preferences-attributes that constitute a focal point of HCI research-and which need to be a part of the development of these AI-based technologies.

The same issues also give rise to important new methodological questions. For instance, how can existing HCI methodology incorporate AI methods and data to develop intelligent systems to improve the human condition? What are the best ways to bridge the gap between machines and humans while designing technologies? How can AI enhance the human experience in interactive technologies; and further could it help define new styles of interaction? How will conventional evaluation techniques in HCI need to be modified in contexts where AI is a core technology component? What existing research methods might be most compatible with AI approaches? And, what will be involved in training the next generation of HCI researchers who want to work at the intersection with AI? Of course the concepts of “design”, “interaction”, and “evaluation” continue to be interpreted by different HCI researchers and practitioners in many related but non-identical ways. Nonetheless, how the potential synergy between AI and HCI will influence these interpretations remains an open but pertinent question.

Naturally, conversations about the relationship between HCI and AI are not new. Shneiderman and Maes (1997) discussed if AI should be a primary metaphor in the human interface to computers. Similarly, Grudin (2009) described alternating cycles in which one approach flourished, while the other suffered a “winter”, characterized by a period of reduced funding, and academic and popular interest. And more than a decade ago, Winograd (2006) argued about the strengths and limitations, as well as the relevance of rationalistic and design approaches offered by AI and HCI respectively, when applied to “messy” human problems. While the landscape of both AI and HCI research has significantly evolved since these early conversations, and researchers have begun to be more vocal about the need for a stronger “marriage” between HCI and AI, nevertheless the competing philosophies and research styles of the two fields, the current context, both academic and societal, demands renewed attention to unifying HCI and AI.

This special issue aims to be a step forward in this regard. We hope to revive and extend prior attempts to bridge HCI and AI, given the burgeoning promise and traction AI has invited recently in tackling challenging human problems. In doing so, we seek to engage both HCI and AI researchers contributing theoretical, empirical, systems, or design papers that aim to unify these two perspectives. We want to bring together research that spans this wide set of issues to help integrate the different parts of this emerging space. By doing so, we aim to begin a constructive dialog to bridge the gap via original research.

TOPICS

Submissions should address key questions in unifying AI and HCI. The following questions are intended to be inspiring, not limiting:

How can we bridge the fundamental mismatch between human-styles of interpretation, reasoning, and feedback and the machine’s statistical optimization for data with high-dimensionality?

How can we incorporate human insights—including stakeholders’ demands, beliefs, values, expectations, and preferences—into the development of AI technologies?

How can we predict the societal consequences of AI system deployment?

How can we systematically evaluate the social, psychological, and economic impacts of AI technologies?

How can we train our next-generation developers and designers to create AI system in a human-centered manner?

How does AI change how we design and prototype new HCI systems and applications?

How should AI interactions be designed to help end users understand AI and make better decisions?

What HCI methods can we use to address AI’s limitations?

What design methods and prototyping tools can help us create novel AI applications and services?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is concerned with computing technologies that allow machines to move, see, hear, talk, think, learn, behave, and connect like humans. Humanized Computing and Communication (HCC) address the ability of a computer to mimic a human in perception, conversation, behavior, and networking. The huge potential of HCC represents an exciting future for individuals and businesses. In addition, business-business, business-human, and human-human may be interconnected in a revolutionary way to stimulate tremendous amount of interesting activities.

The First IEEE International Conference on Humanized Computing and Communication (HCC 2019) is an international forum for academia and industries to exchange visions and ideas in the state of the art and practice of HCC, as well as to identify the emerging topics and define the future of HCC.

TOPICS OF INTEREST include, but are not limited to:

Cognitive AI including machine vision and natural language processing

Conversational AI

Visual AI

Expressions and emotions

Models of human communication and interactions

Models of human and social behaviors

Communicating agents

Social agents

Interactions between visual, conversational, behavioral, and social AI

Millions of users across different continents and countries are daily engaged with privacy and security tasks which are indispensable in modern information systems and services. Such tasks are commonly related to user authentication, human interaction proofs (e.g., captcha), privacy and security pop-up dialogs, setting privacy and security features within online user profiles, etc. Recent privacy and security incidents of famous online services have once more underpinned the necessity towards further investigating and improving current approaches and practices related to the design of efficient and effective privacy and security. In order to achieve this objective, one possible direction is related to providing adaptive and personalized characteristics to privacy- and security-related user tasks, given the diversity of the user characteristics (like cultural, cognitive, age, habits), the technology (like standalone, mobile, mixed-virtual-augmented reality, wearables) and interaction contexts of use (like being on the move, social settings, spatial limitations). Hence, adaptive and personalized privacy and security implies the ability of an interactive system or service to support its end-users, who are engaged in privacy- and/or security-related tasks, based on user models which describe in a holistic way what constitutes the user’s physical, technological and interaction context in which computation takes place.

APPS 2019 aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working on diverse topics related to understanding and improving the usability of privacy and security software and systems, by applying user modeling, adaptation and personalization principles. The workshop will address the following objectives:

CHI PLAY is the international and interdisciplinary conference, sponsored by ACM SIGCHI, for researchers and professionals across all areas of play, games, and human-computer interaction (HCI). We call this area ‘player-computer interaction’. The goal of the CHI PLAY conference is to highlight and foster discussion on high-quality research in games and HCI as a foundation for the future of digital play. To this end, the conference blends academic research papers, interactive play demos, and industry insights. Full paper acceptance rate is typically below 30%.

SUBMISSIONS

As a SIGCHI-sponsored conference, CHI PLAY welcomes contributions that further an understanding of the player experience, as well as contributions on novel designs or implementations of player-computer interactions, including, but not limited to, the following:

Playful interactions and new game mechanics

Innovative implementation techniques that affect player experiences

Studies of applied games and player experiences (e.g., games and play for health, wellbeing, and learning)

Accessible and inclusive design and play experience

Advances in game user research and game evaluation methods

Psychology of players and typologies of games and players

Gamification, persuasive games, and motivational design

Virtual and augmented reality in games and play

Novel controls, input or display technologies for games and play

Tools for game creation

Innovations to advance the work of game designers and developers

Game analytics and novel visualizations of player experiences

Developer experiences and studies of developers

Industry case studies

Although CHI PLAY welcomes contributions on the effects of various technologies, software, or algorithms on player experience, technical contributions without clear indications of the impact on players or developers are not within the scope of CHI PLAY. The conference invites submissions including full papers, workshop and course proposals, interactive demos, work-in-progress papers, and Rapid Communications papers. Additionally, students are invited to submit to the student game competition and the doctoral consortium. Read more on Call: CHI PLAY 2019, 6th ACM SIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play…

4th Games and Natural Language Processing Workshop (GAMNLP-19)
To be held at the 14th Foundations of Digital Games Conference (FDG-19)August 26 or 27, 2019
San Luis Obispo, California, USA

Submission deadline: April 5, 2019

The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) ranges from theoretical studies (e.g., parsing algorithms, computational models of dialogue) to practical applications (e.g., information retrieval, conversational agents, machine translation). This workshop investigates computational and theoretical aspects of natural language research that would be beneficial for designing and building novel game experiences, or for processing texts to conduct formal game studies. NLP would benefit from games in obtaining language resources (e.g., construction of a thesaurus or a parser through a crowdsourcing game), or in learning the linguistic characteristics of game users as compared to those of other domains.

The workshop explores the overlap between the two fields and promotes interaction and collaboration among researchers and practitioners. Despite advances in both games and language research, language as a gameplay mechanism remains a largely unexplored area, often because of the lack of accessible and domain-specific NLP technologies. Language technologies must strike a balance between predictability, creativity, and authorial burden. This often results in a trade-off between using machine learning or neural network based NLP approaches, which cover a wide range of language processing but with limited explanability, and hand-crafted or structured language models, which guarantee finer language control but could limit the scope of the interactions or functionality of a system. This workshop invites both theoretical and applied contributions and we invite authors to reflect on these trade-offs.

Some examples of work that would be appropriate for GAMNLP include:

Game design, usability, and mechanics based on natural language interfaces

Novel uses of natural language processing or generation as a game mechanic

Player immersion in language-enabled mixed reality or physically embodied games

Industries, stakeholders, and the general public approach culture (both tangible and intangible) for a variety of purposes, and digital games can channel each of these purposes in different ways. In the context of a cultural experience, people may want to learn (with serious games) but also to have fun (with simple entertainment games), spend some spare time (with casual games), socialize (with social or multiplayer games), or create (with collaborative creation games). Similarly, cultural institutions wish not only to teach, but also to attract more visitors (promotional games or advergames). In the last decade, there have been substantial developments in the gaming technologies applied to cultural heritage purposes. Technologies like crowdsourcing and human computation have become more sophisticated. New game-oriented (but not only) media such as mixed-reality, virtual reality and natural interaction (e.g. motion-based gameplay) have become more prevalent.

MUM 2019, the 18th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia, will be held on 26-29 November 2019 at the CNR Area of Research in Pisa, Italy.

GENERAL INFORMATION

The International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM) is a leading annual international conference which provides a forum for presenting the latest research results on mobile and ubiquitous multimedia. The conference brings together experts from both academia and industry for a fruitful exchange of ideas and discussion on future challenges, in a comfortable and effective single-track conference format. This year’s conference continues the tradition of innovation and excellence established by previous MUM conferences. In addition to the peer-reviewed accepted papers, the conference program will include keynote presentations, posters, demos and a video track. The conference will also have a co-located doctoral school. The technical program will be complemented by social events to facilitate informal discussions and networking among the conference attendees and invited guests.